Barbara Kay: Apples, oranges and aborted babies

Abortion is legal in Canada. Yeah, we get that. Hear it a lot. A lot. So is driving a car. But driving is a regulated activity, and so far none of the many driving regulations that help to save lives has ever plunged us down that slippery slope to denying people the right to buy a car.

And when I say “save lives” in this analogous way, I am not being coy. I am talking about recognized criminal activity. I am talking about a living human being that is outside the womb. If you cause injuries to a baby that causes it to die when delivered, or you actively kill a child that is alive when outside the womb, even if the umbilical cord is still attached, then according to the Criminal Code of Canada, you are committing homicide.

The MPs from Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario made the request on House of Commons letterhead to RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson.
In the letter, the MPs say abortions performed at 20 weeks gestation or later breach Section 223a of the Criminal Code, which says a person commits homicide when he causes injury to a child before or during its birth as a result of which the child dies after becoming a human being.
According to the Criminal Code, a child is a human being when it emerges completely from the womb — whether or not the umbilical cord has been severed, it is breathing on its own or has “independent circulation.”
The MPs say the killing of Canadian children may continue to grow if they are not thoroughly investigated by police.

MPs from Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario have said they want late-term abortions that result in a live birth and then death to the baby investigated by the police as potential cases of homicide. Naturally the usual suspects are having their usual fit of the vapours at the very idea.

Between 2000-2009, the MPS allege, “there were 491 abortions, of 20 weeks gestation and greater that resulted in live births.” If that is the case – and the sources I have seen are persuasive in their credibility – then we are talking about an average of 54 such births a year.

That’s a few more than the average year’s tally of killings of women by their intimate partners. I got into a Twitter dispute with one of my colleagues yesterday. I asked him if it wasn’t worth one regulatory constraint on late-term abortions if it prevented 54 deaths of living babies a year. He adamantly rejected it: “apples and oranges” he called the comparison.

There is more than one kind of slippery slope. And right now we are on a slippery slope to complicity with criminality.

I reject his comparison. Life outside the womb is life. Unless of course you are one of those creepy new progressive types that call for the right to kill babies with defects up to 30 days outside the womb. I asked my friend: Suppose there were a regulation we could impose that would effectively end spousal homicide of women: Wouldn’t you be eager to see it implemented? He didn’t answer.

But I know what he means by apples and oranges. Apples are women – and their protection from harm is the driver of much anguished public debate. Oranges are live babies that are not really “alive” in the moral sense in his mind if the mother delivering it doesn’t want it.

All that tells me is that this otherwise bright friend is so programmed to believe in the slippery slope of abortion regulation that he can’t bring himself to countenance a single exception to our no-fetters situation. Which is odd, because every other nation in the world insists on certain regulations, and no democratic nation has outlawed abortion in general.

This refusal to stare down the hands-off fetishists is getting downright silly. Worse, it is permitting criminal activity in the name of social harmony. Well, I don’t feel particularly harmonious about those 491 live births and I am betting there are plenty of other Canadians who believe in abortion as a general right, but are also sickened by late-term abortions and would be perfectly happy to see that aspect of the practice regulated.

There is more than one kind of slippery slope. And right now we are on a slippery slope to complicity with criminality. Is this really what most Canadians want, or are they just too cowed by the totalitarian abortion lobby to speak up?